Another swing and miss for director M Night Shyamalan, about the best thing I can say for After Earth is that it is not nearly as bad as the Happening.

Set 1,000 years in the future after humans have resettled on a planet called Nova Prime where they have run afoul of the race of aliens who live there, After Earth tells a simple story in a more complex world. In a bid to reconnect with his estranged son legendary Ranger, and inventor of the life saving ‘ghosting’ combat technique, Cypher Raige (Will Smith) decides to take his teenage son Kitai (Jaden Smith) on a mission to deliver the deadly Ursa predator, a genetically created monster specifically designed to kill humans by smelling their fear, to a training facility for Rangers. Their ship, which is largely constructed with what appears to be advanced tarp technology,  hits an asteroid field and is forced into a warp jump that dumps them off at a planet that is as highly quarantined as possible-Earth. A quick crash later and Cypher has two broken legs and is forced to send Kitai across dangerous wilderness to retrieve a working homing beacon from the separated tail section. And the Ursa is loose…

Okay so I almost fell asleep four times typing all that and I was definitely skimping on details. After Earth is a laborious slog though world building and flashback moments interspersed with only occasionally interesting action set pieces. The effects are questionable in the best of times and my level of concern for the characters hovered around ‘I hope the Ursa eats them’ for most of the film.

It isn’t that all the ideas are bad here but there are so many of them that they drown the good ones like they were owed a huge gambling debt. Pretty much every cool thing on display here is counteracted by something stupid. One example of this comes from the ‘live suit’ that Kitai wears to help him on his trip. This is an adaptive suit with active camouflage that changes when he is in danger or when this surroundings change. That is pretty cool and it adds some nifty looking moments when Kitai enters into new areas. What isn’t so cool is the fact that he picks up a poisonous leech in a river (which he jumps in to avoid killer baboons who apparently don’t swim) that almost kills him because his super nifty suit doesn’t include gloves. That seems sort of weird right? You can have camouflage but then your hands and head are still exposed. The suit is not armor but it seems like if you are going to spend some time making it change colors, textures and surfaces then maybe they would throw on some gloves. Additionally, if you are going to put that kind of effort into the suit that is designed to help its wearer better survive elements then one would think that it would provide some manner of heating system or insulation. This becomes an issue because the Earth for some reason  freezes over every night and Kitai has to make sure he is in a handy thermal hotspot before dark. Seems like the suit should be able to help with that to me. It does allow him to run up the side of a live volcano later so there is that.

The suit is a good illustration that so much of the parts of this movie are contrivances designed to heighten conflict and as dues ex machina to get Kitai out of those conflicts. So the suit has no gloves, hood or heating system but it can have gliding wings to let Kitai fly. The planet’s animals have evolved specifically to kill humans but there is no reason for them to do that because when the humans left the earth was an industrial wasteland. Kitai has to take a solution to allow him to breathe the air better because of contamination but there is no evidence of contamination and there are plants everywhere that should be providing plenty of oxygen. If it weren’t a beautiful blue sky world I would think more of the contamination but it looks more lush and beautiful on Earth than on Nova Prime.

Maybe those points sound nitpicky. They may be but they all irritated me, as did the goofy character names. The larger issue than the fact that nothing really makes a lot of sense if you think about it for more than 10 minutes  is that the movie is really boring. We are handed this set up that Earth is super dangerous but then aside from a giant bird and some baboons, there really aren’t that many dangers along the way. Sure Kitai is pretty much grossly incompetent and makes the worst possible decisions at any given time but the dangers aren’t all that much worse than getting lost in the Amazon jungle right now. Obviously that is plenty dangerous in its own right but I expected more from a planet that has evolved to kill people.

The performances, both of them, are uneven. Okay, there are more people in this, mostly through flashbacks but the meat of the movie is basically Will Smith sitting in a chair and talking to Jaden over his Navicomputer. Will Smith does a good enough job at this for a role that requires him to be stoic and calm all the time but there really isn’t a lot of emoting going on. Jaden, for his part, is pretty terrible. I am not sure if he was going with an accent or if he has a speech impediment (sadly I understood everything he said in the Karate Kid so I am guessing he was trying a hybrid accent of British and Southern American) but he was incomprehensible at times and when he wasn’t I sort of wished he was. Given that the majority of the movie is focused on Kitai, this is a big problem. To Jaden’s credit, like in Karate Kid, his physical performance is excellent and he handles the action scenes very well. If he can sort out some of the rough edges on his acting, he has a lot of potential.

The effects here are also pretty rough and while some things look kind of cool the overall asthetic of the film is drab and boring in the best cases and bewildering and awful in the worst. I really cannot get my head around the design of the ship which seems to be based on treated and hardened cloth. Tarps and climbing webbing are all over the place and there is a liberal helping of saran wrap and shower curtain material for doors. It is just kind of weird. The CGI effects are pretty substandard as well given that the animals that attack Kitai look like something from a cutscene in a PS1 game.

To be fair to After Earth there were a few moments, particularly toward the end, where I found myself getting a bit choked up. I credit that to the closeness between real-life father and son more than anything else but regardless of the reason these moments landed. The overall message of defeating fear is not a bad one either although it is tainted somewhat by the not unlikely theory that this whole movie is a Scientology recruitment tool. I feel like that is stretching in some ways but if it is I really don’t care. It doesn’t make it any better or worse. If it is though, the Scientologists need to take another look at their recruitment movies as their last effort was Battlefield Earth and holy shit.

Conclusion [4.5 out of 10]

After Earth is not the worst movie I have seen this year and it is not really offensively bad by any stretch of the imagination but it is just very boring and very lazy in its storytelling and filmmaking. There is nothing here that is really worth recommending and, as mentioned, the good ideas are hampered by the bad. As mentioned, however, it WAS better than the Happening and I have to take solace in the fact that M Night might be improving his way back to greatness but judging by the speed with which he is doing it we won’t have another good movie from him until sometime in the 2020s. This one is best avoided.